Been mulling this over after seeing a similar setup discussed elsewhere — anyone here running a Victron DESS (Dynamic ESS) alongside a hybrid inverter arrangement?
I've got a MultiPlus-II on the boat and I'm toying with expanding to a proper hybrid setup on a land-based install. The idea of stacking multiple units for three-phase equivalent resilience is interesting, even if most of us in the UK are working single-phase.
The bit I keep coming back to is how DESS interacts with grid-tied logic when you've got a hybrid inverter in the mix. In theory it should be prioritising cheap overnight rates (Octopus Flux, Agile etc.) and discharging during peak — but how well does that actually work in practice when you've got loads that spike hard?
My van conversion runs a single Victron setup with Fogstar Drift cells and it's pretty well-behaved, but I imagine the complexity scales up fast once you're managing multiple inverters and trying to keep the ESS logic happy across all of them.
A few things I'd love to hear from people who've done this:
- Are you running DESS on a UK grid connection, and does your DNO have any strong opinions about it?
- How are you handling the EV charging side — is that a managed load within the ESS or external to it?
- Anyone using a Cerbo GX to tie it all together with a more complex battery bank?
Not necessarily looking to go three-phase, but understanding how people are managing hybrid setups with grid interaction would really help me think through the next step.
